The greatest glory of this set of excerpts from the Ring is
the playing of the orchestra under Philippe Jordan. He tells us in his
booklet notes that the Paris Opera orchestra at the Bastille had not played
the Ring before their series of productions in 2007-10 but given the
splendour of their interpretation here that is hard to believe. Time and
again details of the score that are often muffled or muffed come through
loud and clear - such as the little flecks of woodwind figures at the end of
Act Two of Siegfried. When reviewing the Gergiev set of Rheingold a little
while ago I complained about the reduction of Wagner’s specified
string forces and the deleterious effect this had on the carefully
calculated orchestral balances. Here the booklet lists a massive number of
players, well in excess of Wagner’s already extravagant requirements.
Although one may doubt whether all of them were actually playing at any
given point, the results are startling and impressive, with the filigree
detail of the passages for massed divided strings clear as a bell.

We are told that what we have here is a collection of
‘symphonic extracts’ from the Ring. Inevitably this has
involved a degree of editorial intervention. From Rheingold we are
given effectively all the orchestral passages, which have been collected by
an anonymous hand into one continuous suite rather in the style of one of
Stokowski’s ‘symphonic syntheses’. We have the Prelude
leading into the opening scene - with the vocal lines for Woglinde and
Wellgunde allocated to oboe and clarinet respectively. There’s then a
brief segue into the scene of Alberich chasing the Rhinemaidens and a
further cut into the interlude which ends the first scene. The opening of
the second scene with the Valhalla motif follows. After this comes the
uprushing string theme which introduces Fricka’s first words joined to
Wotan’s “Auf Loge!” and the following Descent into
Nibelheim. The anvil passage towards the end of this interlude is then
joined into the interlude portraying the Ascent from Nibelheim. We then have
the more usual storm music and a slightly cut version of the final scene
generally known as “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla”.

This sequence works very well as a ‘potted’ version of
the opera, with no serious omissions of any purely orchestral passages.
However, as with Klemperer’s recording of Donner’s storm music
which I reviewed for this site earlier this year, the string
figurations sound rather forlorn without the vocal line that overlays them
in the opera, rather like an early pre-echo of Philip Glass’s
minimalist techniques. Nor is the orchestral balance totally ideal. At the
beginning of the Prelude the bassoons low B flat which enters after the
first eight bars is too loud for the even lower E flat in the double basses
which has preceded them. This is a problem of Wagner’s creation; it is
simply impossible for the bassoons to play this note at the
pianissimo which he specifies, and the only solution which gives the
fundamental E flat its proper weight is for the double basses to play with
more presence and volume than the specified dynamic. The original mastering
of the Solti Ring had the same difficulty, but this has by some means
been rectified in more recent re-masterings. With Jordan the anvils during
the Nibelheim interludes have been carefully differentiated - as Wagner asks
- between a smaller number of large anvils and a larger number of smaller
ones, but some of the large ones sound very clunky; and one really misses
the effect of Donner’s hammer striking the rock during the storm
sequence.

After this extensive survey of Rheingold, Die
Walküre and Siegfried get rather short shrift. From the
former we are given only the Ride of the Valkyries - complete with the
anonymous and rather trite concert conclusion, rightly omitted by Klemperer
- and a fairly extended Magic Fire Music starting rather earlier than usual
from the moment when Wotan puts Brünnhilde to sleep; again we miss the
sound of Wotan’s spear striking the rock. Jordan, like many other
conductors, slows down for the final statement of the Valkyries’ theme
on the trombones; but he has to do so quite abruptly, because he has already
set rather a brisk tempo for the earlier statements of the theme, and then
has to accelerate again for the conclusion. Similarly the horn entry in the
Magic Fire music just before the cello restatement of Wotan’s Das
augend lauchtende Paar is rather too jaunty for its context. It consists
of the final segment of the ‘Valhalla’ motif, which is always
used by Wagner in the later segments of the Ring to suggest rest. Its
final appearance in this form in Götterdämmerung occurs at
Brünnhilde’s words “Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!”. On the
plus side Jordan clearly uses Wagner’s specified harp forces of six
players - divided into two groups of three instrumentalist each - during the
Magic Fire Music. This pays real dividends with the pointed playing almost
sounding piano-like during the sparkling statements of the Loge theme.

From Siegfried we are given only the Forest Murmurs, not in
the usual version - with its tawdry glockenspiel entry substituting for the
voice of the soprano Woodbird. We hear a new edition by Wouter
Hutschenruyter which is a vast improvement. It has a more integrated style
and also allows more room for the excited closing bars which can come as
rather a jolt in the traditional concert version.

On the second disc we are given the usual three extracts from
Götterdämmerung. The opening track is described simply as
“Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” but in fact what we have here
is the usual conflation of the Dawn music with an abbreviated love duet and
the whole of the following orchestral interlude. Thankfully it’s
without the blatantly false upbeat conclusion which was appended by
Humperdinck. This leads without a break into the Funeral March and then
segues into the closing Immolation Scene. It is without a bass to
sing Hagen’s solitary line but has Nina Stemme to sing
Brünnhilde. This singer is sounding increasingly mezzo-ish in tone
nowadays but she still has all the force required to deliver her top notes.
She also delivers some lovely quiet tone in her middle section although she
might well have been even more expressive if Jordan had allowed her a little
more time for her phrasing. Again Jordan’s players are highly
impressive, and the final peroration - if a little brisk - is superbly
played with the flickering string figurations clean as a bell.

So a very warm welcome indeed for what we are given here but we
could have been given more. Given these players, one would really have
welcomed the other two Preludes from Die Walküre. From
Siegfried we could have had the three Preludes - which, with their
climactic statements of the Servitude motif, have a real symphonic unity.
The transformation music from Act Three would also have been a real bonus.
As it is, we have two discs of rather short measure, hardly totalling more
than a single CD between them. We are however rightly given the text and
English and French translations of the Immolation Scene.